Edgar is a true lad from Neukölln, Berlin. For over 70 years he’s lived in the same house in the Sonnenallee. In the 1940s, he worked at Berlin’s “red city hall”. His duty: to check prostitutes’ health certificates. He learned a lot in that time. When I meet him, he wallows in memories. He takes me back to a Berlin destroyed by bombing, talks of romances with chorus girls from the Wintergarten theatre and farmers’ daughters, and looks back on his life with satisfaction.

I am a loveable, warm-hearted man, I’d say. Some people have a foul tongue and don’t get themselves across. I talk about things as they are. As they really are. But some people are afraid of the truth. Not me. We mustn’t close our eyes to the truth, or we’d be kidding ourselves.

2. Was sind deine besten Eigenschaften? / What are your best characteristics?

I’m too rough, too wild. My cousin, when she calls, she says, “All right?“ and “Am I speaking to the super sexy boy from Rixdorf?“ I say, “You know, that’s not really the case anymore. You can leave out the ‘super’“. You can have a wonderful chat with the person you happen to be talking to. Without getting loud, without swearing. But a lot of people aren’t capable of that. They kick up a fuss. My time is too precious to kick up a fuss or be loud or cut someone short. I don’t have those kinds of characteristics!

With regards to arguments, my time is too precious for that sort of nonsense. Every hour is precious. The sentence I will now quote is something my mother told me when I was 30 years old: Our life passes quickly, as if we were flying away from it. When I look at the nice pictures I have, the ones taken in the 1950s with my pretty sailing boat, I see that as a wonderful time. When you’re young, you don’t think about death or what tomorrow will bring, because in your mind you still have a long road ahead of you. I know what it looks like on the battlefields. Every single hour is precious.

There are people who feel terribly lonely. And that often is the case. But it depends on you. If you don’t want to be lonely, you need to radiate something. If you go around feeling grumpy and hide yourself away like a snail in its house, then nothing will happen. With a kind and warm-earted word you can do so much.

The death of my wife. That made me sad of course. One of you always leaves the world first. The day before her last, I held her hand, and said, “Thank you for the wonderful time. See you tomorrow.“ The following day the nurse told me: “Your wife passed away.“

My contentment and my gratitude, that’s what makes me happy. And when I think about my wife. Merging with someone, the harmony, being one both spiritually and physically: that’s happiness! And I wish it on everyone who doesn’t have that.

You should be like a student basically, a student going to a lecture. Then you have to have the courage to say: this is what I want to know, I’ll see this through, I want to have studied this just once in my life. I take off my hat to anyone who thinks like that. But, oh! There are so many idiots with a big mouth, they can only blabber and complain and that’s all. No matter whether they’re men or women. How do I know that? Because I’ve seen it all.

I would’ve liked to marry my daughter’s mother. She lived with her mother in a small flat in Kreuzberg in a dark backyard. She wanted me to move in and have her mother sleep in the kitchen, so we’d have the other room to ourselves. But I didn’t have the heart to do that. I wouldn’t let an old mother sleep in the kitchen! And moreover, the loo was outside on the staircase. We shared it with the neighbours. So I’d have to stand in a queue to take a shit in the morning? No, I didn’t want to live in that kind of world. The other thing was that if she had to go the toilet out on the staircase she’d have had to go through our bedroom to get to it. I might be in the middle of shagging and now my mother-in-law comes walking in, ooooh no! No, no, no. I regret I didn’t marry her. I would’ve married her had the circumstances been different. But I didn’t want to live that way. It would’ve ruined my spirit. I would have died a long time ago.

10. Was würdest du gern noch erleben? / What would you still like to experience?

I was so happy in the years 1950, and ‘51. I’d like to have a little sailing boat again. Next year I want to go sailing and go on a motorboat. After all, I’m not an old and grey granddad, I’m still a wild, sexy boy.

Lovely trips with my wife, going out on a motorboat. We had some wild, charming times, it couldn’t get any wilder. I can still see her in her pretty dress! And the many seagulls. And then I think: if only I could have that beautiful day again. I was one of the employees at the “red city hall“ in Berlin. I was in the vice squad. I spent nine months with the charming ladies from the red light district. The girls were nice. They taught me everything when it comes to sex. One woman was 69 and another 71.

12. Was sind deine schlimmsten Erinnerungen? / What bad memories do you have?

The start of the war on 1 September. Berlin went dark, until it surrendered. I stood in front of the Kadewe department store and could see right into the basement. It was just rubble. I cried so much. I walked past so many burnt bodies. There was a moment that upset me terribly: a pretty young girl, one side of her completely burnt! Oh, that was horrible.I had a girlfriend at the time. She was a chorus girl at the Wintergarten theatre. I was called up for military service and we wrote letters to each other. But then I stopped hearing from her. One day I stood on her doorstep and her grandma came out and said to me, “Sailor, you’re too late. My granddaughter was ripped to shreds by an aircraft bomb after an air raid in the Friedrichstraße.” That was the end of a big love. You see, those are the sorts of things I’ve had to experience in my long life. And my father, whom I never met, he was in Verdun. He plucked out the fleas from his uniform every day and night. He was buried under rubble three times, lost his speech and hearing three times, hand grenade splinters wandered around in his body, until his life came to an end in 1926. He was a poor, young man. 30 years old. My mother was only married to him for three months. Those were the consequences of the war. You can’t read about what I’m telling you in a book. But I saw it with my own eyes.

From the age of 30 onwards, I said goodbye to the concepts: fast, right away, immediately, urgent. I would’ve loved to have just had a five-minute chat with this or that colleague. But they always said the same thing: No time, colleague. All the people that said that to me are dead now. Now they finally have time.